A small portion of the footage recorded by Amazon.com Inc.’s Cloud Cam smart security cameras is watched by human reviewers to help improve the devices’ software, Bloomberg reported today.

The revelation adds another wrinkle to the recent scrutiny around tech giants’ use of customer data for quality assurance. This year, word emerged that Amazon employs reviewers who listen to some users’ Alexa conversations in order to catch slip-ups made by the voice assistant. The resulting backlash led Amazon to add a clearer opt-out option for customers, while Apple Inc. and Google LLC pledged to scale back their use of manual audio reviews in response.

Amazon’s Cloud Cam quality assurance program is said to be more limited than the one it runs for Alexa. Bloomberg, citing five people with knowledge of the matter, reported that the company employs a few dozen workers in India and Romania to identify cases when users’ cameras categorize videos erroneously. The Cloud Cam has a machine learning feature that labels footage based on what objects or activities appear in front of the lens. 

The review team reportedly watches up to 150 video clips per day that are typically under 30 seconds and come either from employee testers or from users who willingly share clips for troubleshooting. Amazon notifies those users that footage “may get annotated and used for supervised learning to improve the accuracy of Cloud Cam’s computer vision systems” when they submit videos. However, neither the notification nor the terms of service explicitly state that clips may be viewed by humans.

“We take privacy seriously and put Cloud Cam customers in control of their video clips,” Amazon said in a statement. “Only customers can view their clips, and they can delete them at any time by visiting the Manage My Content and Devices page.”

This is not the first time an Amazon smart home product has gotten caught up in a privacy controversy. Reports published at the start of the year claimed that Ring, a maker of internet-connected cameras the online retail giant had bought in 2018, mishandled user data prior to the acquisition. For a stretch of time, workers at a Ukraine office reportedly had access to a folder that contained every video from every Ring camera worldwide. 

Photo: Amazon